Golf Course, a large navy blue abstract acrylic painting by Ritu Raj (acrylic on woodcut, 4 × 4 ft)

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Abstract Inquiry · 2025

Golf Course

4 × 4 ft · Acrylic on woodcut · 2025

Available · in the studio, Phoenix

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The golf course as abstract field — the sport's landscape stripped of its social weight and held as pure surface.

Golf Course (2025) is part of my Pop Art Collection, a body of work where I use bold color, irony, and graphic forms to explore the cultural rituals of leisure, luxury, and spectacle. Painted in acrylic on canvas, this 48 x 48 inch work combines flat, vibrant greens with hyper-stylized forms, evoking the pristine yet artificial world of manicured landscapes.

The painting is intentionally playful, its clean lines and candy-colored palette referencing the aesthetics of vintage travel posters and advertising. Yet beneath the cheerful facade, Golf Course offers a subtle critique of the exclusivity and environmental contradictions embedded in spaces of leisure.

In spirit, this work resonates with the legacy of Andy Warhol, whose Pop Art works turned everyday consumer culture into icons while simultaneously questioning the emptiness behind the sheen. Like Warhol, I use repetition, flatness, and surface seduction as a strategy — inviting the viewer into a world that is both familiar and unsettling.

But where Warhol’s subjects often remain emotionally detached, Golf Course leans into satire, offering a more overt wink at the absurdity of manicured privilege. The painting toys with the tension between pleasure and critique, spectacle and subversion.

As part of the Pop Art Collection, Golf Course is a celebration of surface as much as it is an interrogation of it — asking what lies beneath the perfect greens, the polished symbols, and the rituals of curated leisure.

Where to see it. In person at RituStudio, Phoenix, by appointment. Represented by Jarrow & Goodman, Los Angeles.

The space it needs

Wall
At least 10 ft wide
Ceiling
10 ft or more
Light
Natural light preferred — the resin catches it and the color shifts through the day
Daylight
Forest green and deep navy keep it steady in daylight, and the carved woodcut relief reads best under raking side light. Direct midday sun can flatten its low contrast, so let the light arrive at an angle.

Lives best in

Living room 5/5

Golf Course earns its 5 here because the near-black and forest green bark with social tension, and a living room can hold that argument across years of daily looking.

Hotel lobby 4/5

The 48-inch square commands a lobby wall without overwhelming it, though the crimson undercurrent may read as aggression in a space designed to soothe arriving strangers.

Details

Size
4 × 4 ft (W × H)
Medium
Acrylic on woodcut
Finish
Epoxy over acrylic. The resin lifts the color off the canvas and holds it forward, so the surface deepens as the light moves across the room.
Year
2025
Collection
Abstract Inquiry
Palette
Near Black · Muted Purple · Forest Green · Deep Navy · Crimson
Weight
About 65 lb
Ready
In the studio; delivery 8–12 weeks

Its ArtGram

ArtGram.Samara

  • Texture5
  • Form2
  • Colour range1
  • Palette2.6
  • Contrast2.2
  • Abstraction Quotient5
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